Almost funny. This is what a floundering empire looks like (via Wired): Insurgencies are amongst the hardest conflicts to predict. Insurgents can be loosely organized, split into factions, and strike from out of nowhere. But now researchers have demonstrated that with enough data, you might actually predict where insurgent violence will strike next. The results,…
Showing all posts tagged Afghanistan
The US still doesn’t know who the Taliban are and have thankfully lost the Afghan war years ago
Via Wired: Since January 2011, the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan claims it’s killed or captured over 100 insurgent “leaders.” Too bad it doesn’t have any clear idea what “leader” means. Any insurgent who commands another person apparently qualifies. And worse, by that criteria, Taliban and aligned insurgents have killed twice as many U.S. troops in…
Memo to Murdoch; Iraq was a disaster you led
Rupert’s tweet today: What was wrong with Iraq war? Sad dam Hussein evil major killer, etc. Execution another matter.. Afghan bad every way now. Perhaps if Murdoch actually read real news, he’d know that violence is escalating every day in Iraq.
Footage of my 2012 PEN Free Voices lecture
I was invited this year to give the 2012 Sydney PEN “Free Voices” lecture on free speech, censorship and war. It was delivered at the Sydney Writer’s Festival in May and in Melbourne in June. ABC published an extract recently. Film footage of the Sydney event is now available. May you be provoked:
My name is the US-led Afghan war and I am a farce
Via The Navy Times: The Pentagon has retained its top propaganda contractor in Afghanistan for $60 million over the next year even as the company remains under criminal investigation by the military’s inspector general and its co-owner has been suspended from receiving military contracts. The military has maintained its ties to Leonie because the company…
Watch the mining vultures start to circle Afghanistan
This was inevitable (via Reuters): Exxon Mobil Corp (XOM.N) is contemplating participation in an oil and gas tender of six blocks in northern Afghanistan, a company spokesman said on Monday. Access to the world’s oil reserves for companies like Exxon has gotten tougher in recent years as governments assert tighter control of their resources. Opportunity…
The clueless American war in Afghanistan
An extract from a new book by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan, author of the … startling book about the disastrous Iraq invasion, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: When Richard Holbrooke became the Obama administration’s Afghanistan point man in January 2009, Summer Coish was keen to join his civilian…
#LeftTurn tackled by Socialist Alternative
The following review of #LeftTurn appears in Socialist Alternative by Tom O’Lincoln: Review:… Left Turn: political essays for the new left.Antony Loewenstein and Jeff Sparrow (eds), Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2012 Capitalism is complicated, and so are the challenges to it. So a book like… Left Turn, offering an array of agenda-setting arguments, is bound to be…
My 2012 PEN Free Voices lecture on free speech and why it matters
The following is published today as the lead piece by ABC’s The Drum: The two-hour drive from Islamabad to Peshawar is along a surprisingly smooth road. Mud-brick homes sit amongst lush, green fields. Police checkpoints are set up routinely to stop unwanted visitors. I am asked why I want to see the troubled Pakistani town…